Rohinton Mistry books

Anthologies

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Standalone Novels

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay in 1952 into a Parsi family and emigrated to Canada in 1975. He began writing short stories in Toronto and published his first collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), before moving to the novels that made his reputation. Each of the three novels takes a different slice of Indian history — 1971’s war with Pakistan, the 1975 Emergency under Indira Gandhi, the late 1990s Mumbai — and examines it through the lives of ordinary people trying to maintain their dignity under pressure from larger forces.

A Fine Balance (1995) is his most widely read work, a large-scale novel set during the Emergency that follows four characters — two tailors from a lower caste, a widow, and a student — whose lives become bound together. It won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was described as one of the great novels about twentieth-century India. Family Matters (2002) is smaller in scale but equally precise, set in 1990s Bombay and centered on an aging Parsi man and the family that must care for him.